Not all those who wander are lost. ~ JRR Tolkien

Children Of War

I wish I could pack my bags and leave;
to hug every sobbing child out there,
the thousands of Omrans’ who sit in rescue cars and ambulances
too shocked to know from where the blood
gushes down their face, too terrified, stunned
to even cry; , two, five, seven, nine year olds,
rescued from under the rubble
of five storied buildings, silently
wiping their hands on the seat of the vehicles.

I wish I could reassure them all
that there are people who love them,
that there is a world in which buildings don’t
topple like house of cards, and where
the sounds of winds and clouds are heard,
more often that the sounds of bombs and bullets;
that trees are not always coated with dust and dirt;
that you can watch movie, you can take a walk
and return, return to your house, not vanish on the way.

I wish I could tell them that the skies,
they are blue, not black from the smoke
the bombs create; that sometimes,
the earth moves and you can see the sunrise;
that at night, it’s not always light
from the rescue operations; and no, not
everyone who looks at you will point a gun at you;
that sometimes, the house will shake
because the earth shakes and not because
something is going up in flames, yet again.

But who am I to say that to them-
to the children of war- who’ve-not trained-
but rather, learnt to shake like a leaf when the skies rumble
day and night, and not a single drop of rain falls;
who’ve learnt that death will always be accompanied
by a broken limb, and blowed-out brains, and
coated in red, the color of the sun at a sunset
they’ve never seen? Who am I to break theirperfect view of the world in which cancer is
unheard of and AIDS does not exist?

Who am I to tell them that they can dream of a world
without war, a world like one in which I live, where the
problem is the rise in the price of potatoes and not
that my father won’t return for the potato curry dinner,
where the problem is the termite in my house
or the lack of drinking water and not that my house
might get bombarded, and my loved ones killed,
where the problem is the in living and not in surviving-
but who am I to tell them that, to the children of war-when I was the one who created it?